Field Notes - No. 2
Two months into drafting Ethan’s book, we had sixty pages of theory. The manuscript was clean, rigorous, but in my view, incomplete. It’s not that what we had on the page was flawed, but the way we were expressing his idea was turning it into philosophy. He didn’t want an abstract work but a conversational way to share his idea.
We had a pivotal decision to make.
Ethan told me he wanted the book to be about the idea, not about him. He cared that the idea was expressed true to his vision, not how it would be conveyed. He wanted me to decide how to do it.
After he mentioned this in our discovery conversations, I asked him how he would feel about writing his book in the first person and using examples from his life to convey his idea. He was intrigued, but wanted to hold off on executing it.
He liked what we were doing, but once he heard my reservation about continuing the way we had been going, he was open to suggestions.
At that point, we had several literary references supporting his position and a single film analogy. Ethan isn’t a film guy; his sphere of influence - both absorbed and shared - shows him to be a money-smart, people person. He was upfront that he was more of a podcast listener than a reader.
Ethan understood right away that we were writing about something that had been discussed before, and that fact supported his idea rather than undermined it. It’s his take on the subject, his way of expressing how influence works rather than being the inventor of the topic.
He had spent thirty years navigating boardrooms, launching businesses, surviving economic downturns, and building a reputation as a perspicacious investor and exceptional shmoozer. He is gifted with people. Relationships are his life; to tell his idea in a way that didn’t make sense to him. He liked the copy and asked if I did.
I said, “It works as is, but coming from you, this book will fly if we add something to support the text.”
“What should we do?” He asked.
He hired me to design how the message would be expressed. He accepted the outline as I wrote it, as long as a separate chapter on Buddhism wouldn't confuse the topic, but said discussing meditation throughout the book would not only work but be an excellent asset in selling the book.
“Let’s lead the message with the story of your life,” I said.
Ethan thought about this and saw how the story could be told through events from his life, but doubted he should put himself in the book, even with a pseudonym.
“I don’t want this to be a vanity project. He said it wasn’t being written to inflate his ego.”
I could tell from our conversation that he wanted to share this idea because it had helped him realign with his values and navigate the complexities of his life to achieve greater success than he had before.
When he realized how much his life changed by shifting his values from money to people, he became much happier. We drafted it without putting him in the text, so since he wanted a book of theory, he was getting it. When I mentioned that he had given me his idea by framing it through his friends, wife, children, himself, and colleagues, he saw that his life was the momentum of the idea rather than a self-centered front for it.
When he hired me to write his book, he brought that same bulletproof posture to our sessions. He arrived with precise frameworks, pristine dictations, and a clear directive: every page needed to demonstrate unquestioned authority.
The trouble was that his authority was suffocating the idea.
In our fifth week of drafting, we reached a critical chapter on organizational panic. His draft outlined a five-point playbook for executive composure—a lecture that read like a press release issued from a fortress. It was logically sound, but it lacked a pulse. The reader was being talked at by an expert who seemed to have stepped onto the stage fully formed, backed by his own success.
After one of our sessions, we went across the street for coffee. Away from the recorder, his body language shifted. He began reminiscing about his early thirties, telling me a story he had no intention of putting in the book: the collapse of his first major fund.
He described sitting in his office at six on a rainy Friday morning, watching his lead investor walk out the door, knowing he couldn't cover payroll on Monday. He spoke about the nausea, the quiet dread of facing his team, and the desperate, unglamorous maneuvers it took to keep the doors open for another forty-eight hours. It was a story of raw survival, told with humility and quiet reflection. When he finished, I asked him why that morning wasn’t in the chapter on panic.
He looked at me, genuinely surprised. To him, authority meant presenting the solution, not the scar. He believed that showing weakness on the page would undermine his standing with the peers and investors he expected to read his book.
We sat with that for a moment.
I told him that readers don't buy books from high-net-worth founders to learn how to be invincible; they read them to learn how to accept mistakes as steps to success.
True authority on the page doesn’t come from proving you were never knocked down—it comes from showing the reader exactly how you stood back up and achieved your mark of accomplishment.
That single conversation changed the manuscript's trajectory. He greenlit including his early failures, letting us ground his strategic advice in his lived recovery.
By dropping the shield of absolute expertise, he didn’t lose his authority—he finally made it real.